Page 63 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Cultural policy Cultural policy is concerned with the regulation and management of
culture and in particular with the administration of those institutions that produce
and govern the form and content of cultural products. This would include
40 organizations like the Arts Council in the UK, the Federal Communications
Commission in the United States, museums, government departments of
education/arts/culture/media/sport etc., schools, institutions of higher education,
theatre administration, television organizations, record companies and advertising
agencies. However, within the context of cultural studies, questions of policy
formation and enactment are connected to wider issues of cultural politics. That is,
cultural policy is not only a technical problem of administration, but also one of
cultural values and social power set in the overall context of the production and
circulation of symbolic meanings.
Although cultural studies has been much concerned with critical thinking and
cultural politics, not many of its practitioners have, at least until recently, taken
cultural policy or the possibility of working with state or commercial
organizations particularly seriously. Indeed, many cultural studies writers have often
appeared contemptuous of such an idea, holding an engagement with policy to be
somehow impure or corrupting. However, during the 1990s a significant discussion
about cultural policy was prompted by the work of Tony Bennett, amongst others.
Bennett argued that the textual politics with which cultural studies has
traditionally been engaged ignores the institutional dimensions of cultural power.
He was particularly critical of cultural studies for displacing its politics onto the level
of signification and text which, he suggested, has been at the expense of a material
politics in relation to the institutions and organizations that produce and distribute
cultural texts. For Bennett, cultural studies has been too concerned with
consciousness and the ideological struggle and has not paid enough attention to the
material technologies of power and of cultural policy.
In this view, culture is caught up in, and functions as a part of, cultural
technologies that organize and shape social life and human conduct; a cultural
technology being part of the ‘machinery’ of institutional and organizational
structures that produces particular configurations of power/knowledge. Here,
culture is not just a matter of representations and consciousness but of institutional
practices, administrative routines and spatial arrangements. Thus, the processes of
social regulation are themselves constitutive of self-reflective modes of conduct,
ethical competencies and social movements. Culture in this reading is best
understood in terms of a ‘governmentality’ that, for Bennett, is the relation of
culture and power that most typically characterizes modern societies.
The debate about cultural policy that Bennett and others initiated often appeared
to counterpoise the development of cultural policy to the more long-standing
generation and elaboration of cultural criticism within cultural studies. However,
there is no necessary reason why cultural studies cannot attend to the important
pragmatic calls of policy without relinquishing the role that ‘critical cultural theory’
has to play. Indeed, it remains important to consider and debate the values that are
to guide policy formation and enactment as an integral part of the policy process
itself.